How to set up a Git server
Though Git is a distributed version control system, a common usage setup is similar to, e.g. SVN, having one central Git server repository and multiple user-specific Git repositories.
Of course, you could use cloud based Git hosting providers like GitHub, Assembla or BitBucket, but here we want to cover the topic of using an own server. Some Git hosting providers also offer a version that you could install on your own server. A free and good one is GitLab (www.gitlab.com).
Usually, Linux servers are used. They make authentication with SSH simple and, if there already runs an Apache, https-authentication also should be quite easy to install. We don’t recomment network shares as central Git repository location, if it is not for reliability then for the possibility to delete or manipulate it directly without intent. If you want to install on a Windows server, setting up SSH authentication can be tricky, so one either has to install Apache to handle https authentication or directly use an own hosting provider like GitLab.
On the Git server, you will need to have installed the Git executables. Download from http://git-scm.com/downloads and install correctly.
Basically, it is possible to pull from and push to any repository, but
Git has problems to push branch changes to a repository with working
copy if it involves changing the checked out branch. On servers usually
you don’t need a Git working tree (you usually don’t edit and commit
directly there). Hence, socalled bare repositories without a working
tree are used. The directories of bare Git repositories usually end with
.git. To create one, invoke
git init --bare /path/to/repository.git
No matter whether you will use SSH or https, you should add all allowed users to the same group, e.g. gitusers and set the guid permissions recursively on the created repository directory structure.
chgrp -R gitusers /path/to/repository.git
chmod -R u=rwX,g=rwXs,o= /path/to/repository.git
Now just set up the SSH as usually, either using private keys (recommended) or password. Then you can clone the repository using the URI <ssh://server:22/path/to/repository.git>. If you already have a local repository that you want to import into the central repository, just add the remote origin with this URI (Remote|Add and then push.